These are our thoughts of Lydgate; and yet when he ceased his singing, none sang better; there was silence in the land. In Scotland, indeed, poet-tongues were not all mute; the air across the borders “gave delight and hurt not.” Here in the south it was otherwise: and unless we embrace in our desolation such poems as the rhyming chronicles of Harding and Fabian, we must hearken for music to the clashing of “Bilboa blades,” and be content that the wars of the red and white roses should silence the warbling of the nightingales. That figure dropped to our pen’s point, and the reader may accept it as a figure – as no more. To illustrate by figures the times and seasons of poetical manifestation and decay, is at once easier and more reasonable than to attempt to account for them by causes. We do not believe that poets multiply in peace-time like sheep and sheaves, nor that they fly, like partridges, at the first beating of the drum; and we do believe, having a previous faith in the pneumatic character of their gift, that the period of its bestowment is not subject to the calculations of our philosophy. Let, therefore the long silence from Chaucer and his disciples down to the sixteenth century, be left standing as a fact undisturbed by any good reasons for its existence, or by any other company than some harmless metaphor – harmless and ineffectual as a glow-worm’s glitter at the foot of a colossal statue of Harpocrates. Call it, if you please, as Warton does, “a nipping frost succeeding a premature spring;” or call it, because we would not think our Chaucer premature, or the silence cruel – the trance of English Poetry! her breath, once emitted creatively, indrawn and retained, – herself sinking into deep sleep, like the mother of Apollonius before the glory of a vision, to awaken, to leap up (εξεθορε says Philostratus, the narrator) in a flowery meadow, at the clapping of the white wings of a chorus of encircling swans. We shall endeavour, another week, to realize this awaking.
PART II.
IS Hawes a swan? a black (letter) swan? since we promised a week ago to speak of swans in connexion with the sixteenth century? Certain voices will “say nay, say nay,” and already, and without our provocation, he seems to us unjustly depreciated. Warton was called “the indulgent historian of our poetry,” for being so kind as to discover “one fine line” in him! What name must the over-kind have, in whose susceptible memories whole passages stand up erect, claiming the epithet or the like of the epithet, – and that less as the largesse of the indulgent that the debt of the just? Yet Langlande’s Piers Plowman, and Chaucer’s House of Fame, and Lydgate’s Temple of Glasse, and the Pastyme of Plesure, by Stephen Hawes, are the four columnar marbles, the four allegorical poems, on whose foundation is exalted into light the great allegorical poem of the world, Spenser’s Faery Queen. There was a force of suggestion which preceded Sackville’s, and Hawes uttered it. His work is very grave for a pastime, being a course of instruction upon the seven sciences, the trivium and quadrivium of the schools; whereby Grand Amour, scholar and hero, wooing and winning Belle Pucelle, marries her according to the “lex ecclesia,” is happy “all the rest of his life” by the lex of all matrimonial romances, – and at leisure and in old age, dies by the lex natura. He tells his own story quite to an end, including the particulars of his funeral and epitaph; and is considerate enough to leave the reader in full assurance of his posthumous reputation. And now let those who smile at the design dismiss their levity before the poet’s utterance: –
O mortall folke, you may beholde and see
Howe I lye here, sometime a mighty knight.
The ende of joye and all prosperitie
Is death at last thorough his course and might.
After the day there cometh the dark night,
For though the day appear ever so long,
At last the bell ringeth to even song.
– it “ringeth” in our ear with a soft and solemn music to which the soul is prodigal of echoes. We may answer for the poetic faculty of its “maker.” He is, in fact, not merely ingenious and fanciful, but abounds – the word, with an allowance for the unhappiness of his subject, is scarcely too strong, – with passages of thoughtful sweetness and cheerful tenderness, at which we are constrained to smile and sigh, and both for “pastyme.”
Was never payne but it had joye at last
In the fayre morrow.
There is a lovely cadence! And then Amour’s courtship of his “swete ladie” – a “cynosure” before Milton’s! – conducted as simply, yet touchingly, as if he were innocent of the seven deadly sciences, and knew no more of “the Ladye Grammere” than might become a troubadour: –
O swete ladie, the true and perfect star
Of my true heart! Oh, take ye now pitie!
Think on my payne which am tofore you here, –
With your swete eyes behold you me, and see
How thought and woe by great extremitie,
Hath changed my colour into pale and wan!
It was not so when I to love began.
The date assigned to this Pastyme of Plesure is 1506, some fifty years before the birth of Spenser. Whether it was written in vain for Spenser, judge ye! To the present generation it is covered deep with the dust of more than three centuries, and few tongues ask above the place, – “what lies here?”
Barclay is our next swan – and verily might be mistaken, in any sort taken, by naturalists, for a crow. He is our first writer of eclogues, the translator of the ‘Ship of Fools,’ and a thinker of his own thoughts with sufficient intrepidity.
Skelton “floats double swan and shadow,” as poet laureate of the university of Oxford, and “royal orator” of Henry VII. He presents a strange specimen of a court-poet, and if, as Erasmus says, “Britannicarum literarum lumen” at the same time, – the light is a pitchy torchlight, wild and rough. Yet we do not despise Skelton: despise him? it were easier to hate. The man is very strong – he triumphs, foams, is rabid, in the sense of strength – he mesmerizes our souls with the sense of strength – it is as easy to despise a wild beast in a forest, as John Skelton, poet laureate. He is as like a wild beast, as a poet laureate can be. In his wonderful dominion over language, he tears at it, as with teeth and paws, ravenously, savagely: devastating rather than creating, dominant rather for liberty than for dignity. It is the very sans-culottism of eloquence – the oratory of a Silenus drunk with anger only! Mark him as the satyr of poets! fear him as the Juvenal of satyrs! and watch him with his rugged, rapid, picturesque savageness, his “breathless rhymes,” to use the fit phrase of the satirist Hall, or –
His rhymes all ragged,
Tattered, and jagged,
to use his own, – climbing the high trees of Delphi, and pelting from thence his victims underneath, whether priest or cardinal, with rough-rinded apples! And then ask, could he write otherwise than so? The answer is this opening to his poem of the ‘Bouge of Court,’ and the impression inevitable, of the serious sense of beauty and harmony to which it gives evidence.
In autumn when the sun in virgine,
By radiant heat enripened hath our corne,
When Luna, full of mutabilitie,
As emperess, the diadem hath worne
Of our pole Arctic, smiling as in scorn
At our folie and our unstedfastnesse –
but our last word of Skelton must be, that we do not doubt his influence for good upon our language. He was a writer singularly fitted for beating out the knots of the cordage, and straining the lengths to extension; a rough worker at rough work. Strong, rough Skelton! We can no more deride him than my good lord cardinal could. If our critical eyebrows must motion contempt at somebody of the period, we choose Tusser, and his five hundred points of good husbandry and housewifery. Whatever we say of Tusser, no fear of harming a poet, –
Make ready a bin
For chaff to lie in,
and there may be room therein, in compliment to the author of the proposition, for his own verses.
Lord Surrey passes as the tuner of our English nearly up to its present pitch of delicacy and smoothness; and we admit that he had a
melody in his thoughts which they dared not disobey. That he is, as has been alleged by a chief critic, “our first metrical writer,” lies not in our creed; and even Turberville’s more measured praise, –
Our mother tongue by him hath got such light,
That ruder speche thereby is banisht qwyht, –
we have difficulty in accepting. We venture to be of opinion that he did not belong to that order of master-minds, with whom transitions originate, although qualified, by the quickness of a yielding grace, to assist effectually a transitional movement. There are names which catch the proverbs of praise as a hedge-thorn catches sheep’s wool, by position and approximation rather than adaptitude: and this name is of them. Yet it is a high name. His poetry makes the ear lean to it, it is so sweet and low; the English he made it of, being ready to be sweet, and falling ripe in sweetness into other hands than his. For the poems of his friend, Sir Thomas Wyatt, have more thought, freedom, and variety, more general earnestness, more of the attributes of masterdom than Lord Surrey’s; while it were vain to reproach for lack of melody the writer of that loveliest lyric, ‘My lute, be still.’ And Wyatt is various in metres, and the first songwriter (that praise we must secure to him) of his generation. For the rest, there is an inequality in the structure of his verses, which is very striking and observable in Surrey himself: as if the language, consciously insecure in her position, were balancing her accentual being and the forms of her pronunciation, half giddily, on the very turning point of transition. Take from Wyatt such a stanza as this, for instance, –
The long love that in my thoughts I harbour,
And in my heart doth keep his residence,
Into my face presseth with bold pretence,
And there campeth, displaying his banner.
and oppose to it the next example, polished as Pope, –
But I am here in Kent and Christendom,
Among the Muses where I read and rhyme;
Where, if thou list, mine own John Poins, to come,
Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time.
It is well to mark Wyatt as a leader in the art of didactic poetic composition under the epistolary form, “sternly milde” (as Surrey said of his countenance), in the leaning toward satire. It is very well to mark many of his songs as of exceeding beauty, and as preserving clear their touching simplicity from that plague of over curious conceits which infest his writings generally. That was the plague of Italian literature transmitted by contagion, together with better things – together with the love of love-lore, and the sonnet structure, the summer-bower for one fair thought, delighted in and naturalized in England by Wyatt and Surrey. For the latter, –
From Tuscane came his ladye’s worthy race:
and his Muse as well as his Geraldine. Drops from Plato’s cup, passing through Petrarch’s, not merely perfumed and coloured but diluted by the medium, we find in Surrey’s cup also. We must not underpraise Surrey to balance the overpraise we murmur at. Denying him supremacy as a reformer, the denial of his poetic nobleness is far from us. We attribute to him the chivalry of the light ages – we call him a scholastic troubadour. The longest and most beautiful of his poems (“describing the lover’s whole state”) was a memory in the mind of Milton when he wrote his Allegro. He has that measure of pathos whose expression is no gesture of passion, but the skilful fingering on a well-tuned lute. He affects us at worst not painfully, and
With easie sighs such as folks draw in love.
He wrote the first English blank verse, in his translation of two books of the Æneid. He leads, in seeming, to the ear of the world, and by predestination of “popular breath,” that little choral swan-chant which, swelled by Wyatt, Vaux, Bryan, and others, brake the common air in the days of the eighth Henry. And he fulfilled in sorrow his awarded fate as a poet – his sun going down at noon! – and the cleft head, with its fair youthful curls, testifying like that fabled head of Orpheus, to the music of the living tongue!
Sackville, Lord Dorset, takes up the new blank verse from the lips of Surrey, and turns it to its right use of tragedy. We cannot say that he does for it much more. His ‘Gorboduc,’ with some twenty years between it and Shakspeare, is farther from the true drama in versification and all the rest, than ‘Gammer Gurton’ is from ‘Gorboduc.’ Sackville’s blank verse, like Lord Surrey’s before him, is only heroic verse without rhyme, – and we must say so in relation to Gascoigne, who wrote the second blank verse tragedy, the ‘Jocasta,’ and the first blank verse original poem, ‘The Stele Glass.’ The secret of the blank verse of Shakspeare, and Fletcher, and Milton, did not dwell with them! the arched cadence, with its artistic key-stone and underflood of broad continuous sound, was never achieved nor attempted by its first builders. We sometimes whisper in our silence that Marlowe’s “brave sublunary” instincts should have groped that way. But no! Chaucer had more sense of music in the pause than Marlowe had. Marlowe’s rhythm is not, indeed, hard, and stiff, and uniform, like the sentences of ‘Gorboduc,’ as if the pattern one had been cut in boxwood: there is a difference between uniformity and monotony, and he found it; his cadence revolves like a wheel, progressively, if slowly and heavily, and with an orbicular grandeur of unbroken and unvaried music.
It remains to us to speak of the work by which Sackville is better known than by ‘Gorboduc,’ – the ‘Mirror for Magistrates.’ The design of it has been strangely praised, seeing that whatever that peculiar merit were, Lydgate’s ‘Fall of Princes’ certainly cast the shadow before. But Sackville’s commencement of the execution proved the master’s hand; and that the great canvas fell abandoned to the blurring brushes of inadequate disciples, was an ill-fortune compensated adequately by the honour attributed to the Induction – of inducing a nobler genius than his own, even Spenser’s, to a nobler labour. We cannot doubt the influence of that Induction. Its colossal figures, in high allegorical relief, were exactly adapted to impress the outspread fancy of the most sensitive of poets. A yew-tree cannot stand at noon in an open pleasaunce without throwing the outline of its branches on the broad and sunny grass. Still, admitting the suggestion in its fulness nothing can differ more than the allegorical results of the several geniuses of Lord Dorset and Spenser. Tear-drop and dew-drop, respond more similarly to analysis – or morbid grief and ideal joy. Sackville stands close wrapt in the “blanket of his dark,” and will not drop his mantle for the sun. Spenser’s business is with the lights of the world, and the lights beyond the world.
But this Sackville, this Earl of Dorset, (“Oh a fair earl was he !”) stands too low for admeasurement with Spenser: and we must look back, if covetous of comparisons, to some one of a loftier and more kingly stature. We must look back far, and stop at Chaucer. Spenser, and Chaucer do naturally remind us of each other, they two being the most cheerful-hearted of the poets – with whom cheerfulness, as an attribute of poetry, is scarcely a common gift. But the world will be upon us! The world moralizes of late and in its fashion, upon the immorality of mournful poems, upon the criminality of “melodious tears,” upon the morbidness of the sorrows of poets, – because Lord Byron was morbidly sorrowful, and because a crowd of his ephemeral imitators hung their heads all on one side and were insincerely sorrowful. The fact, however, has been, apart from Lord Byron and his disciples, that the “αι αι” of Apollo’s flower is vocally sad in the prevailing majority of poetical compositions. The philosophy is, perhaps, that the poetic temperament, half way between the light of the ideal and the darkness of the real, and rendered by each more sensitive to the other, and unable, without a struggle, to pass out clear and calm into either, bears the impress of the necessary conflict in dust and blood! The philosophy may be, that only the stronger spirits do accomplish this victory, having lordship over their own genius – whether they accomplish it by looking bravely to the good ends of evil things, which is the practical ideal, and possible for all men in a measure – or by abstracting the inward sense from sensual things and their influences, which is subjectivity per
fected – or by glorifying sensual things with the inward sense, which is objectivity transfigured – or by attaining to the highest vision of the idealist, which is subjectivity turned outward into an actual objectivity.
To the last triumph, Shakspeare attained; but Chaucer and Spenser fulfilled their destiny and grew to their mutual likeness as cheerful poets, by certain of the former processes. They two are alike in their cheerfulness, yet are their cheerfulnesses most unlike. Each poet laughs: yet their laughters ring with as far a difference as the sheep-bell on the hill and the joy-bell in the city. Each is earnest in his gladness: each active in persuading you of it. You are persuaded, and hold each for a cheerful man. The whole difference is, that Chaucer has a cheerful humanity: Spenser, a cheerful ideality. One rejoices walking on the sunny side of the street: the other, walking out of the street in a way of his own, kept green by a blessed vision. One uses the adroitness of his fancy by distilling out of the visible universe her occult smiles: the other, by fleeing beyond the possible frown, the occasions of natural ills, to that “cave of cloud” where he may smile safely to himself. One holds festival with men – seldom so coarse and loud indeed, as to startle the deer from their green covert at Woodstock – or with homely Nature and her “douce Marguerite” low in the grasses – the other adopts for his playfellows, imaginary or spiritual existences, and will not say a word to Nature herself, unless it please her to dress for his masque and speak daintily sweet and rare like a spirit. The human heart of one utters oracles – the imagination of the other speaks for his heart, and we miss no prophecy. For music, we praised Chaucer’s, and not only as Dryden did, for “a Scotch tune.” But never issued there from lip or instrument, or the tuned causes of nature, more lovely sound than we gather from our Spenser’s Art. His mouth is vowed away from the very possibilities of harshness. Right leans to wrong in its excess. His rhythm is the continuity of melody, not harmony, because too smooth for modulation – because “by his vow” he dares not touch a discord for the sake of consummating a harmony. It is the singing of an angel in a dream: it has not enough of contrary for waking music. Of his great poem we may say, that we miss no humanity in it, because we make a new humanity out of it and are satisfied in our human hearts – a new humanity vivified by the poet’s life, moving in happy measure to the chanting of his thoughts, and upon ground supernaturally beautified by his sense of the beautiful. As an allegory, it enchants us away from its own purposes. Una is Una to us; and Sans Foy is a traitor, and Errour is “an ugly monster,” with a “tayle;” and we thank nobody in the world, not even Spenser, for trying to prove it otherwise. Do we dispraise an allegorical poem by throwing off its allegory? we trow not. Probably, certainly to our impression, the highest triumph of an allegory, from this of the ‘Faery Queen’ down to the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’ is the abnegation of itself.
Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Page 133